A Canadian snowboarder who was temporarily stripped of his Olympic gold medal for having trace amounts of marijuana in his system is now in the medical cannabis business and says the product — set to be legalized next year — could be the new wine.

“It was a quick shift,” Ross Rebagliati told CBC News.

“Even the most entrenched cannabis activist would never have imagined 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, that we would see recreational cannabis coming down the pipeline.”

Rebagliati won a gold medal in the 1998 Winter Olympics but was disqualified when trace amounts of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) showed up in a post-race blood test. The medal was eventually returned because marijuana was not on the list of banned substances at the time.

“It’s been a wild ride. It seems like it was fast and for the most part it has been. I did have to wait around for a little bit for culture and society and the laws to catch up so that I could launch Ross’ Gold. I saw the same parallel with snowboarding. It wasn’t accepted, then it was, then it got really big. I definitely see the same thing happening here.”

That was 19 years ago and Rebagliati now runs a medical cannabis branding business in Kelowna.

A researcher at the University of Calgary, however, says there’s a surprising gap in studies which look at the effects of weed on young brains.